Vienna calling

A bratwurst stand near a park in Vienna. One in the morning.

A drunken geezer with a thick caterpillar mustache is serenading me with an old German love song. He has mistaken me for a “Filipina,” a gooey love-struck expression on his face. How did I get here? I feel like a Von Trapp trapped by the Nazis. Strangely, I can’t help but be touched — not literally, though. I quickly finish my meal and leave the Kaiser look-alike in mid-song. No sausage for you, old man. Watch me disappear like a doe, a deer, a female deer.

I am in the Austrian capital for the Vienna International Film Festival (more on that in The STAR’s Art & Culture section), and tomorrow I am going back to Manila (but the incoming typhoon would leave me stranded in Amsterdam, billeted in a hotel straight from Kubrick’s The Shining, but that is another story altogether).

It has been a couple of days of many alarms and more surprises in Klimt’s country, Hitler’s homeland.

Just this morning I was walking around Stadtpark, which has a convenient pub a few steps away from the park entrance serving Ottakringer beer. Vienna (after Berlin and Manila) is one of the best cities to consume mugs and mugs of frothy brew. How ingenious: The cure for hangover in these parts is a “repair beer” and Viennese goulash (different from its potato-ridden cousin in Hungary) in the morning with lots of sauce and roasted sausages, which you can order in many cafés and classic pubs.

I took a lot of photos around the city: statues of Johann Strauss, Prince Eugene, and Ludwig with a large crane rising dramatically from his backside like a conductor’s baton. I sat on a park bench, admiring the graying couples sitting together with sandwiches at hand, joggers and bicyclers, swans floating on the pond. It was a postcard moment. You could put a stamp on the whole thing and mail it to your mother. Then along came a pale-looking man with a mullet who asked me if I wanted to buy drugs. I must’ve looked like a likely customer — what with long hair, black fingernails, blearily red eyes and all. Drat! A blot on my Hallmark Viennese moment.

But Chemical Brother No. 1 and Kaiser Casanova are the only hassles in this trip to Vienna. What could be a better gig than watching Brocka or Von Trier in the afternoon, partaking of bratwurst and beer in the evening, and in the small hours listening to music (from Falco to Arcade Fire to Vampire Weekend) at the Lusthaus or the Badeschiff Wien? At the press lounge, I was supposed to drink Ottakringer beer but couldn’t find a bottle-opener. A bald German guy kindly opened it for me using the crown of another beer bottle — just like how the neighborhood toughies in Malabon do it. It turned out that the guy is Thomas Heise, who made a three-hour documentary about life in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall called Material.

I dig this city. The festival organizers, hotel employees and random Viennese residents I asked for directions patiently told me how to get to everywhere from the festival theaters near my hotel and just around the Ring, to the farther-off tourist spots such as the Museumsquartier or Freud’s house at 19 Berggasse (or Hill Street) which was turned into a museum in 1971. The pioneer of psychoanalysis lived and worked there for 47 years. The famous couch here; the massive collection of antiques (including an urn depicting Dionysus which would in time hold Freud’s ashes), books by Goethe and Schiller, and cigars there. I wondered if the photo of Lou Andreas-Salomé (who was courted by both Rilke and Nietzsche, and became Freud’s disciple) was still around somewhere.

A cab driver even pointed out Mozart’s house or some other place of significance to Amadeus, Amadeus. He didn’t say where the singer who had a hit with Rock Me Amadeus lived. (Back in the Philippines, someone would ask me what Falco has been doing lately; I told him aside from being dead, nothing much.) Daniel, a philosophy student at the University of Vienna who works part-time as festival chauffeur, told me what bars and clubs to check out. I could just imagine him grappling with Wittgenstein or dialectical materialism while gripping the steering wheel.

If you’re a fan of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt or Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Vienna will beguile you with wonders. If you do have euros to burn (poor journalists such as me don’t), there are rows upon rows of posh shops on the street where the great church is. St. Stephen’s Cathedral at Stephansplatz is famous for its roof of glazed tiles, the main entrance to the church called Giant’s Door, and its catacombs with the remains of over 11,000 people. I would find out later on that there are even catacomb tours, but by then it would be too late to go underground.

Lore has it that Beethoven found out he was deaf because he saw birds flying out of the bell tower but couldn’t hear the damn bell tolling. But the great composer didn’t allow the rest of his life to be ruled by rests and silences.

The Heils are Alive

A cocktail party at the Lusthaus, Falco’s Der Kommissar (“Drah’ Di net um, oh oh oh… Schau, schau, der Kommissar geht um! oh oh oh…”) and German hip-hop waft from the speakers. A gutturally funky Tuesday evening.

I fall into a conversation with a feature writer from the Netherlands and an Austrian-Iranian film critic. We are in a suggestively-named club that used to be a hunting lodge of the Hapsburgs, someone having built it for a secret lover or something. Good food, very good wine, and beer all you can. I tell them I collect books about the Nazi Occupation (The Nazis and the Occult, The Nazi Doctors, etc.), which I regard with as much horror as Clive Barker or Lionsgate movies. From another journalist I found out some juicy facts.

The Fuehrer — who as a youth was rejected twice at the state-sponsored academy of fine arts in the Austrian capital — stayed in the royal suite of the Hotel Imperial whenever in Vienna. It was his dream to walk the red carpet trodden by the Hapsburgs. Maybe he even had a bathrobe stitched with his initials “666,” er, “AH.” And ordered room service — something meatless because he was a vegetarian.

Mark Edmundson’s book The Death of Sigmund Freud begins in the late autumn of 1909 with a middle-age Sigmund and a young Adolf both living in Vienna. Freud was at the height of his powers; he just recently published the imposing Interpretation of Dreams. Meanwhile, Hitler was living on the streets, shoveling snow on the street and sidewalk of the Imperial Hotel after bad blizzards, seething with rage at his despondency. In 1938 he made a triumphant return to the city of his youth in an open-topped Mercedes accompanied by SS (Schutzstaffel) troops, swastikas and black eagles everywhere. That could’ve been a scene in Babangon Ako at Dudurugin Kita. There was a huge gathering at the Heldenplatz (Hero’s Square) where Hitler proclaimed the inclusion of Austria (which he renamed “Ostmark”) into the German Reich.

The Nazis hated Freud with a passion, burning his books in nefarious outdoor rallies. Remember what Heinrich Heine said: “Where one burns books, there one eventually burns people.” And that was waxing prophetic.

The next day I take a walk in the area where the statue of Prinz Eugen of Savoy (Prince Eugene) is, near the Rathaus or Vienna City Hall. No one around, probably just the ghost of a battalion of Stormtroopers that once was here, marching and hailing the dark lord — not unlike Darth Vader’s army in Empire Strikes Back. I walk off, heading for the gathering chill. It bugs me no end. What, pray tell, could be scarier than history?

I can think of one. An old drunken mustachioed man looking for a lover in the dark. Singing.